Objection: We Should Not Take Up God’s Time with Petty Healing Needs When So Many Other People Have Far More Serious Problems
This objection is based on the flawed but common premise that God is a like a giant time-sharing computer system, so if someone makes demands on Him, it decreases His ability to meet other demands. That is a ridiculous portrayal of our Almighty God, who could easily heal everyone at once in the blink of an eye. In fact, He actually WILL do that when Jesus returns and we all get our new never-to-be-sick healthy eternal bodies! You do believe He’s coming back, I hope, because He is! When He does, do you believe that all believers will get new bodies at once? That’s what will happen! That proves right there that there is no power drain in heaven when one person taps into His healing power; He has plenty of power to make everyone’s body submit to Him at once. It doesn’t matter if you have been written off to die from cancer; healing that cancer will not cause a brownout in heaven! Receiving healing from a pimple will not hinder someone else’s ability to be healed of asthma at the same moment.
You will hinder your prayer life if you maintain the erroneous idea that God’s attention is divided among all people who are praying at the moment. If that were true, you would want to pray at odd times when fewer people were praying to increase the proportion of His attention that He can give you.
The truth is that God can give everyone in the world His undivided attention at once! When you pray, you have His undivided attention, and so does your neighbor if he is praying at the same time. How can this be? It’s because God does not inhabit time, He inhabits eternity (Isaiah 57:15). He is outside of time. He created time. Time did not exist until “the beginning!” That’s why there was nothing before God – when there’s no time, there’s no such thing as “before.” Aren’t you glad you don’t have to wrap your head around all this and understand the things of God intellectually? He only asks you to believe them!
So God, who is beyond time, can “reach into” time and listen to you and “simultaneously” (from our perspective within time) listen to someone else. So you are not causing anyone else to miss out by praying for anything you want!
Three other Scriptures reinforce the obvious notion that God created time. There are references to “before the world began” in Romans 16:25, 2 Timothy 1:9 and Titus 1:2. Thus, the world had a beginning (as Genesis 1:1 also states).
Interestingly, in the first and third of these references, the Greek literally reads before time everlasting and before everlasting time. This probably why the NKJV chose to use the phrase “before time began” in Titus 1:2 (and also 2 Timothy 1:9); it would seem to be a fitting translation. Even just taking the King James Version at face value (“before the world began”) is still probably good enough, as it still points to a “beginning” before which (by definition) there could have been no time. (If something was “before” the beginning, whatever that something was would be at the beginning of time instead!)
Some cosmologists have proposed that the world has basically an infinite past of big bangs and implosions that follow one another. Such theories explain nothing, as there is always one more previous big bang or implosion, so there would be an infinity of past time, so it would be impossible to ever get to “now!” There is always one step further back in time in their theory. I don’t know how anyone can think that such events could be an explanation of where everything ultimately originated. More recently at this writing, more scientists are lining up with the idea the universe had to have a “beginning,” though they keep searching for an explanation that would exclude an outside influence (God!). Some of these concepts like the recent concept of “imaginary time” and unobservable (and thus forever unverifiable) “dark matter” would seem to take more faith to believe than the plain truth of the Bible!
Because at one point there was no time, we know that God created time. He Himself still lives outside of the time that He created. That is why He can tell you exactly what will happen in the future in His Word. It is also why He has literally all the time in the world to hear your requests, no matter how numerous!
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